This White Paper analyzes U.S. statutory obligations regarding arms sales and military assistance to Saudi Arabia in the context of the ongoing conflict in Yemen. The United States has provided significant support for Saudi Arabia, including over $115 billion in arms sales over the last eight years. During the course of hostilities conducted by a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen over the last two years, the United States has provided billions of dollars of equipment for use in Yemen and provided in-flight re-fueling to support bombing operations. In light of credible allegations of widespread violations of international humanitarian law by all parties to the conflict resulting in significant civilian casualties over the last two years, concerns have been raised about the legality of further arms sales under U.S. law. In the face of persistent reports of wrongdoing, Saudi Arabia has failed to rebut allegations or provide detailed evidence of compliance with binding obligations arising from international humanitarian law. In the context of multiple credible reports of recurring and highly questionable strikes, even after Saudi units received training and equipment to reduce civilian casualties, the United States cannot continue to rely on Saudi assurances that it will comply with international law and agreements concerning the use of U.S.-origin equipment. Under these circumstances, further sales under both the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act are prohibited until the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia takes effective measures to ensure compliance with international law and the President submits relevant certifications to the Congress. Congress should utilize the expedited review procedures of both Acts to ensure compliance with the law.

Friday, May 19, 2017

On May 24, 2017, the American Arbitration Association-International Centre for Dispute Resolution Council and Columbia Law School will hold a conference on "The Future of Arbitration - Challenges, Opportunities and Expectations." The program is here.

The Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court (ICC) entered into force in 2002. Now, the ICC faces its most significant challenge -- the prospect of a mass exodus by African countries. Complaints of institutional bias against African leaders, supported by a general critique of western superintendency attaching to international law’s long and close association with colonialism (the mission civilisatrice), haunt the future of atrocity accountability in Africa. Borrowing from the critique of the western juridical tradition, as framed by the spectral imagery of Jacques Derrida and applied as critique to international criminal law by Kamari Maxine Clarke, this Article reshapes that discussion by situating the discussion of atrocity accountability also within the framework of the neopatrimonial state and the lingering ethnographic presence of the politicized Big Man. Post-colonial and ethnographic narratives are then set against the vibrant and less discussed backdrop of African civil society to forward cautious support for the progressive development of the ICC in Africa owing to effective modalities supporting the ICC’s principle of complementarity below the formal structures of the state.

What is international criminal justice? The authors of this book set out a framework for understanding international criminal justice in all its facets. Considering both definition and content, the authors argue for its treatment as a holistic field of study, rather than a by-product of international criminal law.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book draws on a range of legal and extra-legal disciplines. Whilst addressing crucial legal questions throughout, it also considers the role and impact of politics, history, psychology, terrorism, transitioning society, and even the idea of hope in how we understand international criminal justice. Challenging many of the prevalent paradigms of thinking in this area, Gideon Boas and Pascale Chifflet explore whether it is possible to reconcile some of the enduring intellectual conflict, such as whether and how retributive and restorative approaches to justice can co-exist.

Ashley Deeks (Univ. of Virginia - Law) has posted Statutory International Law (Virginia Journal of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

International law pervades the U.S. Code. This will come as a surprise to many members of Congress, as well as to those who accept the common trope that Congress is ignorant about or hostile to international law. It also may be news to foreign affairs scholars who study those areas in which Congress necessarily must interact with international law, such as where the Senate provides advice and consent to treaty ratification or Congress enacts implementing legislation to further U.S. treaty commitments. Even those who have examined these high-profile congressional interactions with international law likely are not attuned to the breadth and depth of Congress’s voluntary interactions with international law in a wide variety of situations in which it legislates.

The little-discussed proliferation of international law throughout U.S. statutes – termed here “statutory international law” – is the launching point for the article. Because limited attention is paid to congressional engagement with international law, current legal literature lacks a descriptive and theoretical account of when, why, and how Congress engages with these norms to advance its legislative goals. This article is the first to systematically examine the phenomenon of statutory international law.

Tracking how these norms find their way into statutes reveals the critical but often unseen influence of the Executive on the language of legislation. Further, the presence of statutory international law in the U.S. Code has important implications for the development of customary international law. It accelerates the amount of state practice that the Executive and courts produce and correspondingly empowers the United States to shape customary international law. This, in turn, reduces customary international law’s notorious democracy deficit. In the domestic context, statutory international law introduces new factors to inform ongoing debates about the Charming Betsy canon of statutory interpretation, while highlighting confounding effects on the separation of powers in foreign affairs.

The case for the desirability of the modern system of investment treaty arbitration rests on certain stylized historical claims. Those claims serve to demonstrate that the pre-modern system of dealing with investor-state disputes was inferior compared to current arrangements, which allow foreign investors to initiate highly legalized (or “depoliticized”) arbitration against host state governments for alleged violations of investment treaties. The implication of the historical comparison is that we should accept, and perhaps even expand, investment treaty arbitration to avoid a return to the bad old days. This Article challenges the historicity of this standard story through an in-depth examination of a forgotten but important episode of expropriation from the 1970s, Mauritania’s seizure of the MIFERMA iron ore operations. As I show below, politicized dispute settlement need not entail, nor even risk, resort to force. It can even be successful, especially where both home and host state government perceive mutual gains from continued cooperation. This does not mean that investors get everything they want, when they want it. In politicized dispute settlement the investor does not control the process — though he can certainly influence it — and the investor’s interests are not the only ones in play. More generally, the Article suggests the utility of micro-historical analysis of investor-state disputes as a methodology for gaining a more realistic understanding of how legalized investor-state dispute settlement coexists and interacts with, and may even support, “diplomatic protection”, broadly construed, and negotiated outcomes.

Children are the victims of some of the most devastating examples of state-sanctioned and private human rights abuse. In increasing numbers, they are attempting to find international protection, and are forced to navigate complex administrative and legal processes that fail to take into account their distinct needs and vulnerabilities. The key challenges they face in establishing entitlement to refugee protection are their invisibility and the risk of incorrect assessment. Drawing on an extensive and original analysis of jurisprudence of leading common law jurisdictions, this book undertakes an assessment of the extent to which these challenges may be overcome by greater engagement between international refugee law and international law on the rights of the child. The result is the first comprehensive study on the manner in which these two mutually reinforcing legal regimes can interact to strengthen the protection of refugee children.

This paper explores two questions of the recent China-Australia FTA (ChAFTA): what is the approach of the ChAFTA? What are the challenges to the ChAFTA? It argues first that the ChAFTA adopts a problem-solving approach to harvest “low-hanging fruit” (e.g. tariff cuts). Containing WTO-based and WTO-friendly rules, it focuses on trade and investment facilitation through market liberalization and carefully written good governance norms. In spite of its short form investment chapter, the agreement is not as shallow as one may first think. It stimulates development concerning, among other things, regulatory issues (e.g. regulatory transparency and cooperation in financial services, regulatory autonomy in investment), the negative list approach for services and investment, investor-state dispute settlement, and the investment facilitation arrangement. The development appears to be often affected by the position of Australia. Second, the ChAFTA will meet challenges in implementation and future negotiations. The former includes vague rules, soft obligations, the considerable need for wide-ranging cooperation, and the usage rate. The latter is probably the complexity of legal issues, as well as internal (including sensitive issues such as labor mobility and review of investment by Chinese SOEs) and external uncertainties (including the WTO law, the US-China investment treaty negotiations). Finally, the future of the ChAFTA depends on bilateral cooperation in FTA implementation, and the political willingness to develop a rule-based system. The ChAFTA could bring an incremental paradigm shift of China’s FTAs, which will carry vast implications for China’s participation in international economic legal order.

The Australian Journal of Human Rights (AJHR) is currently accepting submissions for Volume 23, Issue 3, 2017.

The Australian Journal of Human Rights is a peer reviewed journal that aims to raise awareness of human rights issues both in Australia and internationally. This is a general issue and you are invited to submit articles in the range of 6,000-8,000 words on any legal aspect of human rights, along with associated philosophical, historical, economic and political issues for consideration.

The deadline for submission of articles for consideration in the AJHR is:

1 June 2017 for Issue 23 (3), with a publishing date of November 2017

1 December 2017 for Issue 24 (1), with a publishing date of April 2018

The AJHR uses an online management system for submission of articles and book reviews for publication.

SUBMIT YOUR MANUSCRIPT HERE

Please visit here to begin the process. Registration takes only a few minutes.

The AJHR is published three times per year. For more about the AJHR, visit our website.

State responsible for an internationally wrongful act is generally under an obligation to make full reparation for the injury caused by this act. This article argues however that there are general limitations to the obligation to make full reparation. It reviews the practice of States in endorsing less-than-full reparation or even actively campaigning against full reparation in certain circumstances. It also notes the importance of the recognition of less-than-full reparation by judges and scholars in order, in particular, to facilitate the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Lastly, it identifies three alternative criteria explaining less-than-full reparation.

Public deliberation is essential for democracy to flourish. Taking decisions away from elected bodies and transferring them to courts seems to diminish deliberation. The damage appears even greater when decisions are taken away from domestic bodies and given to international courts — organizations considered to be completely independent from the public. But this view is mistaken. It stems from perceiving courts as saying the last word on the issues on their agenda. International courts are in fact engaging in a dialogue with the public, with governments, and with an elite of professional lawyers. International courts can spark a debate instead of silencing it. This paper explains how international courts shape public discourse by supplying legal arguments to the public and by building networks of activists, how these courts interact with governments, and how they form an international community of lawyers. Considering all this, the paper concludes that international courts improve public deliberation.

One of the most fascinating developments in the domain of international law in the last few decades is the astonishing proliferation of non-binding legal instruments, generally referred to as soft law. The forms and origins of various nonbinding legal instruments are quite varied, but what they have in common is the promulgation of norms, commitments, or directives, explicitly avoiding the imposition of legal obligations on the relevant parties. The legal status of soft law is debated in the literature, but my concern in this essay is different: I aim to provide an account of the rationale of soft law from the perspective of the practical reasons that can rationalize such instruments. The argument is focused on analyzing the idea of authoritative advice, suggesting that when authorities advise their putative subjects, they purport to give the subject what I call presumptive reasons for action. I explain here what presumptive reasons are and what their rationale is, suggesting it as a model for the practical reasons in play when soft law operates vertically, in cases of nonbinding directives of international authorities. Horizontal soft law, that normally comes in the form of international treaties, is also explained by employing the idea of presumptive reasons, coupled with the mutual accountability relations that such agreements invariably constitute.

Customary principles regarding contracts concluded with foreigners are deeply rooted in ancient rules of customary international law governing the treatment of aliens. The recent intense development of investment arbitration has been a golden opportunity to further clarify how these principles have developed and are applied to current contractual practices. Admittedly, there is now in general international law a set of principles recognizing and taking into consideration the distinct features of State contracts, beyond the specific rules regarding the protection of foreign investment. Moreover, this process of internationalization has progressively been enriched by principles that are more familiar to international commercial arbitration, and in particular those related to the "ordre public transnational". However, the scope of these principles is limited and it would be exaggerated to suggest the existence of a consistent and complete international law regime of State contracts. Some differences remain as regards issues for which the law applicable to the contract or the doctrinal conception of State contracts has an impact on the principles and rules applicable by the tribunal.

Among the most significant developments in international investment law and policy in the past decade has been China’s adoption of a new model of bilateral investment treaty that embraces disciplines commonly found elsewhere. This has been celebrated by some scholars as heralding the arrival of a universal model for investment protection that will be transformative of Chinese domestic policy. Others have expressed skepticism that Chinese policy portends liberalization of the Chinese economy. Nor does it indicate that China has embraced neo-liberal norms requiring the state to recede from controlling the levers of economic power. Both sides purport to derive their readings from shifts in Chinese investment policy and internal legislative change. We propose another reading derived from shifts in Chinese Communist Party leadership and the Party’s perception of what is required to guarantee its stability and continued dominance. The object is to understand Chinese BIT policy as a product of the complex and interacting influences reflected in debates within the CCP. By examining four main eras in which China BIT policy has evolved, we propose bringing the Party back into discussions about investment treaty policy.

The American Society of International Law calls for submissions of scholarly paper proposals for the ASIL Research Forum to be held during the ASIL Midyear Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri at Washington University School of Law.

The Research Forum, a Society initiative introduced in 2011, aims to provide a setting for the presentation and focused discussion of works-in-progress. All ASIL members are invited to attend the Forum, whether presenting a paper or not.

Papers may be on any topic related to international and transnational law and should be unpublished (for purposes of the call, publication to an electronic database such as SSRN is not considered publication). Interdisciplinary projects, empirical studies, and jointly authored papers are welcome.

Proposals should be submitted via the form here by June 26, 2017. Interested paper-givers should submit an abstract (no more than 500 words in length) summarizing the scholarly paper to be presented at the Forum. Abstracts will be considered via a blind review process. Papers that do not follow these guidelines will not be considered. Notifications of acceptance will go out by the end of July.

Papers accepted for presentation will be assembled into panels. The organizers welcome volunteers to serve as discussants who will comment on the papers. All authors of accepted papers will be required to submit a draft paper four weeks before the Research Forum (September 29, 2017). Accepted authors must commit to being present on both Friday, October 27 and Saturday, October 28, 2017. Draft papers will be posted in advance of the Forum on an asil.org website accessible only by attendees of the Forum.

Despite the clear overlap in the aims and purposes of socio-economic human rights law protection and securing adequate access to essential public services for all in society, there is little academic literature that analyses these topics in tandem. This volume is the first comprehensive work to fill this gap by identifying the common challenges for essential public services provision and socio-economic human rights realisation, and by exploring how socio-economic rights law can be harnessed to reinforce better access to services. An important aim of this book is to understand how international socio-economic human rights law and guideposts can be used and strengthened to improve access to services, and assess socio-economic legal and policy decisions in this field.

The volume includes contributions on a range of different services (e.g. water, energy, health care, medicines, clean air, disaster management) and engages with the realities of different regulatory settings, e.g. on different continents, in different countries and in particular regimes (i.e. EU, WB, WTO, Uganda, Sweden, Mozambique, Colombia. China, India and Brazil). The key challenges engaged with in the volume include: sufficient (public and private) resources mobilisation, private actor involvement and regulation, planning for adequate services provision, and the underexplored themes of 'participation’ and ‘accountability'.

This review “diagnoses” climate change as an international governance challenge and explores the political feasibility of alternative “cures.” Human activities’ growing effect on Earth's climate system is extremely challenging, characterized by, inter alia, very long time lags between mitigation measures (∼costs) and environmental effects (∼benefits) and by stark asymmetries between “guilt” in causing the problem and vulnerability to climate change. Two main cures have been suggested. Some analysts argue that because climate change is a global process, adequate solutions must likewise be global. Others shift attention from the challenge's format to the sources of human motivation, arguing that a decentralized (bottom-up) approach will more directly engage a wider spectrum of motivations and actors. These cures are neither mutually exclusive nor easily combined. IR research contributes more to the former cure than to the latter but can play a constructive role in linking them.

This year, the London-Leiden conference will revisit a theme it explored in 2009: preliminary references at the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). The UK's notice of its intention to withdraw from the EU has cast into doubt the future of its relationship with the CJEU, and the fate of the Unified Patent Court. In its 56th year, the London-Leiden meeting on EU will examine the uncertain nature of these relationships, in Sessions I and II, and host a Brexit Roundtable in Session III. Please join us to discuss these important and complex issues with experts from the UK and abroad.